Walking to Martha's Vineyard – February 23th 2015

Last month, Book Lovers Among Students met to discuss Franz Wright’s celebrated book of poems Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003). Hauntingly beautiful, minimalistic, but also brutally honest and seasoned with a great deal of sense of humor, these poems explore the themes of depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, as well as recovery, Catholic faith, human mortality, spirituality and gratitude. Wright claimed in one of his interviews that a lot of poems published in Walking to Martha’s Vineyard were “written either walking to, during, or walking home from mass. I would get home and just type them out, and often I wouldn't revise them.” While the second part of that statement was generally received with some deal of skepticism (considering the formal mastery demonstrated by the author in these poems), the remark about the importance of Catholic faith inspired us to discuss the status of religious poetry in Academia and beyond. Although religious poetry might be regarded as “a song of the past”, at least by the contemporary reader influenced by modernism, post-modernism and avant-garde writings in general, there exists a powerful trend in American poetry, which dates back to Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and confessional poetry, that embraces spirituality as its main theme. Wright is both a continuator of that tradition and a reformer in the field, stating that honesty of the experience (of both writing and reading) is his key objective. In an interview with Lawrence F. Laban (Poetry Center, The University of Arizona), Wright argues that “[a]nyone can write obscure poetry filled with mysterious but ultimately shallow and pointless non sequitur-like gibberish. Language like this is extremely dangerous (...) (It is also, incidentally, the best way to conceal a lack of talent for writing, or a lack of experience, of anything important to say.) (...) Great poetry that can be read by any person with a 6th grade reading ability, writing that is not infected with the weird malaise of irony, that is writing of primal sincerity and devotion to the experiences of real human beings in all times and places, has a chance of surviving.” The cynical reader will discredit Wright’s power; the honest reader will embrace him in all his beauty.

by Małgorzata Olsza

Franz Wright (1953 - )

Franz Wright, the son of James Wright, is a Pulitzer-Prize winning American poet and translator exploring the themes of religion, spirituality, redemption, illness and  renewal. He was born in Vienna on March 18, 1953. During his youth, his family moved to the Northwest United States, the Midwest, and northern California. Wright’s deeply spiritual, meditative and minimalistic poetry spans forty years of his personal development as a poet and as a person. His collection of poetry include:

• F (2013)

• Kindertotenwald (2011)

• God’s Silence (2006)

• Walking to Martha's Vineyard (2003)

• The Beforelife (2001)

• Midnight Postscript (1993)

• Tapping the White Cane of Solitude (1976)

The poet has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, among other honors. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Selected sources

The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/franz-wright_b_956927.html

The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/09/in-the-beforelife-franz-wright

by Małgorzata Olsza

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts to European immigrant parents: Otto and Aurelia Plath. She spent her early childhood years in a seaport town of Winthrop, then, just after her father’s death in 1940, she moved to the town of Wellesley, Boston’s suburbia. It obviously influenced Plath’s life, but also left a truly significant mark on her literary work, as the theme of the absent father is visibly present in her texts. That, and other themes, as well as Plath’s own experiences are somewhat depicted in the The Bell Jar, which eventually allows the readers and critics to consider it a semi-autobiographical novel. It is a sort of a coming-of-age story, but instead of a stable and subtle progress into maturity and adulthood, the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, slowly regresses into distortion and madness.

[2013-03-22] LIFE ON MARS

This month, BLASt's meeting was devoted to Tracy K. Smith's book of poems entitled Life on Mars. Published in 2011, the collection was awarded The Pulitzer Prize in the following year. Our discussion focused on the treatment of science, science-fiction and the notion of the universe both in poetry and in prose, as well as the differences between the two modes. We also investigated Smith's formal approach towards poetry writing and her re-working of the elegy genre, the poet's use of pop-references (incl. David Bowie and Charlton Heston) and the affinity of her works with confessional poetry.

Tracy K. Smith (1972 - )

Born on April 16, 1972, Tracy K. Smith was raised in Falmouth, Massachusetts. She studied at Harvard and later went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University.

Smith is the author of three books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award; and Life on Mars (2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.